Shocking Photo Shows Elephants Fleeing a Fire-Wielding Mob

This award-winning photo captures a harrowing scene of an Asian elephant calf and mother fleeing for their lives.

View Images

An Asian elephant calf and its mother flee from a mob, throwing fiery balls of tar, in the Indian state of West Bengal. Photograph by Biplab Hazra, Sanctuary Nature Foundation

PUBLISHED November 10, 2017

The shocking photograph of an Asian elephant calf on fire has won a wildlife photography competition—drawing global attention to the battlefields of elephant-human conflict in India.

The photograph, titled “Hell Is Here,” depicts a disturbing scene: an elephant calf and its mother trying to flee a mob in the Indian state of West Bengal, the calf set aflame by fiery balls of tar lobbed at the pair.

“I had never seen such an incident in 14 years of my wildlife photography career,” Hazra, a brick-kiln owner by trade, told the New Indian Express. “All my concentration was only on clicking the photograph.”

In a matter of hours, the photograph has ricocheted around the world, highlighting the tensions between India’s human and pachyderm inhabitants.

Text Messaging Helps Elephants and People CoexistWATCH: A text-messaging system alerts people in rural Valparai, India, to the presence of elephants.

Elephants use at least 101 corridors to traverse India, but only about a fifth of them are free of human settlements, according to an August 2017 survey by the Wildlife Trust of India. Two thirds of corridors have state or national highways passing through them—and less than 13 percent of corridors are totally under forest cover.

Nowhere in India do humans and elephants clash more than in West Bengal, where the photograph was taken. About 488 elephants live in the state’s northern forests, many of which are rife with human settlements and tea gardens.

Such proximity sparks deadly violence, especially when elephants rummage through farms, destroy crops, and damage homes. According to the Times of India, 18 people were killed by elephants in part of West Bengal in the first nine months of 2015. In March 2016, district authorities called for the extermination of a “rogue” elephant that killed two people. And regularly, elephants in West Bengal die from electrocution after bumping into electric wiring.

Hazra told the New Indian Expressthat the elephant calf he photographed may not have been intentionally set on fire, but he says that the region’s farmers regularly use burning tar and fireworks to ward off elephants—a tactic that can spiral out of control.